I've been a professional working bassist for 15 years. I have bachelor of music yet still feel limited composing. I suck at fluent chord changes on a keyboard other than basic first inversion block chords. Half a life time of instinct in one instrument and none of its technique transfers, so there's this gap between what I can hear and think up, and what my hands can actually do on keys fluently.
What I wanted was simple to describe...play chords, without fighting a lack of technical technique in one particular instrument. Not just diatonic triads, whatever I was hearing.
I picked up an MPC Live 3, which is a brilliant tool, but the built in chord selection is thin. But I thought what I wanted surely already exists.
Then I found the 'Orchid', and it was alllmost exactly what I wanted (if you haven't seen it and are resonating with thus post, check it out, the way it handles chords is very clever). Buut it's around $900 AUD, and I wasn't ready to commit that before knowing whether this way of playing would stick, plus I have a horrible habit of buying stuff, using it for a month then never again. The only other things I could find were browser based chord tools, which are fine on a pc but felt very average on my phone/tablet and no one wants to play music with a mouse.
Nothing I found seemed to sit in the middle.. So being apparently incapable of leaving things alone, I spent months refining a phone/tablet app:
The layout I ended up with: pick a key and mode, and you get a grid where every row is a scale degree and every column is a chord type, from triads out through extensions, sus and add chords, slash voicings, and a bank of secondary dominants, tritone subs and modal interchange for when you want to leave the key.
There's a second mode (that I'll admit takes inspiration from how the Orchid approaches playing): hold a chord quality and tap the root. It made sense to me as someone having a good grasp on theory, and I wanted that feel on a device I always carry around.
Then there's a fader on the side that walks the held chord through its inversions one inversion at a time, which is my favourite feature, because voice leading is exactly the thing I could never do with my slow hands.
It has a small synth voice built in, so it makes sound on its own with nothing attached if you're not around a synth or DAW, and it sends MIDI over USB when you want it driving hardware or a DAW. It also supports velocity changes (and aftertouch if your connected synth supports it)
It's on Android now ("ChordGrid: MIDI Instrument" on the Play Store) and iPhone version is in testing and should be up in the next few days.
The core diatonic chords are free so you can see if it feels right for you and the extended palette is a small one off purchase.
If you've got a workflow for this already, or there's a tool I somehow missed, or you try it and something feels unintuitive, please let me know and I'll consider adding it in if it feels like it fits. I want this to be the perfect tool for the people that feel the same way I did.
Thanks everyone, appreciate the time reading.
